Women at Work - Unpause Yourself

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

We reflect on what moving ahead means now and give advice on when and how we should be pushing ourselves, as well as ways to protect a job you love. Guests: Kathleen McGinn and Daisy Wademan Dowling. Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash womenatwork. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. For many of us, the pandemic and now the recession have limited our ability to make a career move. But there are aspects of our professional lives that are still in our control. We'll be talking here about how to get to where you want to be despite the constraints. We'll also talk about how to protect a job you love, but that may be at risk.

Let's start with that first scenario. You'd been working toward a change, maybe a different team, different company, different industry, different salary band. Maybe you were trying to step into a leadership role. Your career was on the upgrade, and now you feel like you're in maintenance mode or even regressing. We asked Kathleen McGinn for insight on what moving ahead means now and for advice on when and how we should be pushing ourselves. Kathleen's a professor at Harvard Business School. In her research, she explores the relationship between gender and

career mobility and how people negotiate better futures for themselves. Kathleen, thank you so much for being on the show today. Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Me too. So in the beginning of this season of our show back in April, we were talking about muddling through day to day, how that was sort of just enough at that moment. But now here we are in June talking about a return to professional advancement. And I

think a lot of women are still beyond stretched. So are we getting ahead of ourselves or is it the right time to be thinking about professional advancement? It's natural for everyone to be thinking about professional advancement. That's what professional women think about, but it's also natural to be exhausted. So there's been a lot of discussion about this energetic level of response initially to the stay at home. And now we're exhausted. We're in this phase where we are starting to come out and look around. So we're moving to both physically and professionally opening up. But that's a really unknown phase following so many unknowns in the previous two phases.

It's an opportunity to assess and to adjust and to look around you and see what is there and see how you'd like to respond. It's probably not the time to be jumping into things. One of the many ways that people have talked about this period is that so many people are in a time of grief. And one of the things you learn about grief is that you shouldn't be making really big decisions in the throes of the first stage of grief. And that's a reasonable way to think about where we are. We are becoming accustomed to a very different life than we thought we had. And it's time to assess. It's time to start thinking about what adjustments you want to make. But it's probably not time yet to jump into something hugely new because we are still dealing with. We've had the pandemic, we've had economic recession. How much agency do you see women having to get where they want to be professionally?

So agency is an interesting word. We think of agency as on others. But I like to think of agency, and we have a study of this right now, on how you speak for and think of yourself, whether you think of yourself as making the decisions, as framing your world. Many have talked about Viktor Frankl's work, Man's Search for Meaning. And he talked about meaning as found in the self in the moment. That's the fundamental sense of agency that we have to keep alive during this time. To ask yourself, what brings you meaning in the moment? In that sense, yes, we need to be highly agentic right now. Clay Christensen, one of my colleagues at HBS who

recently passed away, one of the things he would say to me and others on a regular basis is, decide what you stand for and then live it all the time. That's agency. Living out your values every day. It doesn't mean like every single thing you do is totally consistent with your sense of values and some higher level goal, but it means that you're focusing on the few things, the activities, the changes that are related to that higher level goal. And even if most of them don't work out right now, you're going in the direction that brings you meaning. That's agency. It's really interesting that you put it that way because a moment of truth like this, and we've had several moments of truth in the last few months, sort of helps you discover what

you stand for, right? But doesn't that also in turn drive you forward professionally? Absolutely. And I think that right now, this reflection is not just what's going to bring me meaning, how do I bring meaning to the world, but when things really do start to open up, what are the actions I'm going to take to deal with the barriers that are out there? So think about what it is your approach is going to be is very different than saying, I'm going to jump now. For some women, you can do it right now. Some women are very much in settings where opportunities are presenting themselves. But many of us are waiting and waiting not just as a time of reflection, but a time of planning for what's next. Right. One of the things that in terms of like sort of

the emotional situation for many of us right now is that we don't feel like we have control. And maybe the illusion of control, it was, maybe that was imagined before the pandemic. But now, especially in these like intersecting crises we're having, it just feels like a lot is happening to us. And I'm curious, one, how do we wrap our heads around what we do have control over, and how do we pace ourselves so that we're taking action at the right points? As you said, not jumping in necessarily right now, but pacing ourselves so that we're ready when there is time to take action. Right. Such a great question. This is a really unusual crisis because it is both an individual and personal crisis for nearly everyone in some way, and it is the largest collective crisis I think the world has ever engaged in. So because it's a collective crisis, the way to really think about how to continue moving forward has to do with that

collectivity. I'm senior associate dean for faculty development, and I work with a team, there's four of us. We work together a lot. We're on at least one long Zoom call a week, sometimes many, lots of emails flying back and forth. And all of us are at her parents' house, working literally from her childhood desk for 12 weeks. One of them has two young children at home. She's trying to homeschool. Her husband's also working from home. They're trying to coordinate schedules. But as everybody knows, young children aren't that easily tucked into your work schedule. One lives with her sister who has health conditions that make her at really high risk for the virus. And two really large dogs that are a part of every one of our Zoom calls. And I lost both my parents and my sister's been hospitalized over the past six

weeks. So we check in with each other. We send each other notes. We take turns being comforters and being comforted. We ask one another, should I be doing this now? Is this the time for this? Are we ready for this? Is the school ready for this? Is our team ready for this? Are our programs ready for this? As one of the listeners wrote to us, we're all connected in uncertainty, anxiety,

and fear, and we can be connected in hope. And I just, I loved what she said. And it is the answer to your question, how do we know when to move forward? when's the time, we ask one another. We turn to those who are in the same set of crises we are. Our group of four is no more unique than any other group of four working together. Everyone has a personal crisis they're living through right now, and we have a collective crisis that is holding us both together and apart. And we need to be checking in with one another to see if now's the time. Right. I love that point about asking others, because I think one of the sort of mental blocks that happens when you're in a situation where you don't have a lot of agency or where you're feeling grief or trauma is that you somehow convince yourself you're being lazy or using the event

as an excuse. Like, I should be focused on my career. I should be doing these things. I love the idea of actually reaching out to others and saying, does this feel like the right time for me? Yeah. And what you're saying, Kathleen, made me think about the fact that, you know, you said it. We've never been through anything like this before. There are no rules. Where's the playbook? And so the sounding board function of friendship is that much more important right now. Mm-hmm. And many are worried about, I lost my job. Where do I go? How do we explain this gap in my CV? This is going to be a gap that everyone in the world understands. This is the time for you to say, if I am now on furlough, if I don't have

a job right now, what can I do to bring my skills to a place where they feel at use. And in the future, I'm going to explain this gap in my CV by saying, I was working in a food bank because I lost my job. And that's fantastic. And I would hire you if you said that. Right. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free

at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Thank you. by Columbia Business School professor, Madhupe Akanola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Madhupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So Kathleen, I imagine among our listeners are people who were in the process of becoming a leader, of convincing themselves and the people they work with that they were growing into

leadership, that they could do it. And now they're wondering how to carry on with that transition. What do you say to them? I would say this is your opportunity to think about negotiation as something ongoing. You are creating value for yourself in this really unusual time of learning and growing in ways we didn't even know we could grow. You are creating value for your boss by simply being there at a time when so many can't be. You're creating value for the organization by responding to this just total unknown. And now's the time to advocate, not necessarily for a raise or for promotion, but for public recognition of your involvement in that value creation. People should be announcing one another's successes.

Ask your supervisor, your coworkers, your friends to talk about your successes, and you'll talk about theirs, to make your value known, and to let others know that you know your value. So it's very different not to be asking for sort of compensation right now than to be ignoring the value that you're bringing to the organization. And after the successes that you're helping put in place right now, talk with your boss about what you learned, about how you grew through the experience, about what you're ready for next. And when your company comes out of the end of this, that value is going to be understood and you can build from that. So I think people think right now is a time when you shouldn't be negotiating. But if you think about negotiation in a broader way of creating value, now is exactly

the time we should be negotiating. What can we do for our organizations, for our families, for our partners, for our children, for our career right now that creates value? Yeah. Well, and that's also to your point earlier about taking time now to lay the groundwork so you're ready to act later, right? You're demonstrating your value. So when you are able to ask for that promotion or raise, you've laid the foundation, right? Absolutely. I want to ask about the practical piece around raises and promotions right now because we've heard from several of our listeners that they were on the cusp of a promotion or a raise, or they had been promised a promotion or a raise, and that has fallen through. You just said it now is not the time to negotiate,

but how hard should people be pushing right now? I mean, obviously laying the foundation is important, but when they've been promised something that hasn't come through, is there any room to push back or to negotiate? I think probably pushing right now is a tricky thing. Everybody's being pushed in so many directions. Organizations aren't telling really talented people that they're not going to promote them after all because the organization doesn't want to promote them. They're telling really talented people that they're not going to promote them because they don't have the resources, because the projects have been canceled, et cetera. So it is a time to push for how can I bring something to the organization now? And I understand, and to make it really clear, I understand that that compensation,

that promotion is going to come. As dean of faculty, I had to talk with all of our faculty about this at our most recent faculty meeting. We are moving into the next academic school year, not knowing what faculty are going to be doing. They don't know how they're going to be teaching. They don't know how many people they're going to be teaching. And I had to say, we don't know, but work with us and as a community, we will get through this and at the end of this, we will make sure, we're measuring as we go and we will make sure that people get the recognition and the compensation.

But we can't do it right now. We can't figure out a priori how to compensate and reward people for we don't even know what tomorrow is. And so I think what people should be pushing for is that announcement, that measurement of making sure that people are aware of what they're doing and constantly having the conversation. I know now is not the time and I'm really happy that I can be here now working through this. And I know now is not the time, and I'm really happy that I can be here now working through this. And I know that tomorrow's going to bring us back to a place where we can get back to compensation and promotions going with the work. So how will we know when it is the time?

Yes. So we know when it is the time by curiosity and questions. So one of the keys to negotiations is always looking out for the other. So with Corinne Lowe and Nava Ashraf, we created a girls negotiation project for girls in Zambia. And this has become a curriculum for girls around the world. And we translated everything we know about negotiation into four words, me, you, together, build. I need to understand what I need and what I can give. I need to understand what you need and what you can give. We need to work together to understand what the constraints are, what the roadblocks are,

what the timing issues are. And then together, we need to figure out how to build the value that you bring and I bring into something bigger. And those four simple words are so easy to remember. Okay, what is it that I need? What is it that I bring? What is it that my boss needs, my organization needs? What is it they bring? And when to start asking is when I realize that what we're doing together has started to really pay off so that there are resources that I can now start to tap into to get the compensation, the promotion, the recognition for what it is we're building together. What advice do you have for listeners who are feeling just really emotionally exhausted and paralyzed in this moment? Maybe are listening to this and thinking, there's no way I can even take any

of these steps. I'm just stuck. Any advice for them? Yes. And this is, I am trying very much to learn Spanish. I've been doing it for years. I've now gotten to the point where I work out to my Spanish lessons. It's my own form of meditation. And one of my favorite phrases in Spanish is poco a poco, which is just like step by step, bit by bit, one little piece at a time. And I think this in many ways brings us back to this discussion of Frankl. If you're living out your meaning every day, a little bit at a time, and the activities that you're engaging in, the conversations you're engaging in, the just rest you're engaging in is somehow tied to where you get and give meaning, step by step is going to bring you so far. Kathleen, you've made all of this seem so much more manageable. All these crises have

been so overwhelming and your insight cuts through to the place where we can deal with it. We can deal with it bit by bit. It's the only way we can deal with it. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. Thank you very, very much. It's been a really rough time for me too. And I so value the opportunity to talk with you about what everybody's collectively going through. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future

and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. coached women on protecting their jobs through the Great Recession, and she's back with advice. Daisy's a consultant and longtime contributor to HBR. She's an expert on communication, leadership, and managing stress, and she's also the founder and CEO of WorkParent, a consulting firm that advises organizations and parents. Daisy, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So what are you hearing from your clients and other people in your life who may be afraid of losing their jobs right now?

What's coming back to you? So the overwhelming thing that I'm hearing from people is a sense of not knowing exactly what to do. People are concerned. They're scared. They're feeling the effects of the pandemic in their lives in so many different ways. They're worried about their jobs. They're still working very, very hard, but they're not sure exactly what actions to take on their own behalf or with the people around them to try to make things better, to try and get more sense of security and comfort themselves, and to feel like they're going to be in that job six

months or a year from now. Back in 2008, you actually wrote an article for HBR. It's called How to Sell Yourself When Your Job's at Risk. The advice was very practical then and feels quite relevant today. Can you just take us through what you said in that piece and how it applies to this moment? Sure. And if I could go back and put a fresh headline on that piece and reissue it for today, it would be this. Don't assume that your colleagues or your boss are clairvoyant. In other words, each of the things that I recommend to people then and now are really around communicating, communicating what you're doing, what your priorities are, what your value is, communicating who you are as a professional. So because we're all working remote, because we're all in crisis, a lot of people have really stepped away from some of the day-to-day communications

and signaling that they would get in the normal course of business. Remember, your colleagues can't necessarily see you anymore and they're busy. They're stressed out themselves. So the main things that I suggested in that piece 12 years ago and that I think are still really relevant today are ways to get yourself back on that radar, but in a way that's appropriate to the situation. So the first thing that I recommend is drawing attention to great work that somebody else has done. Now, I think it's really stressful for anybody. I know it's hard for me to sort of pound our own chests or to say, look at all the great work I did, toot our own horn. It's a lot easier if you're bragging about somebody else. So if you go to your boss and you say, look, my colleague who just started at the organization six months ago or who's

working for me did a fabulous job helping to get this major document or project or report across the line. And I'm delighted that the client received it very well. Well, you're praising somebody else, but what you're also saying is, listen, we got this done. I was part of a winning team. And under my stewardship, under my leadership, this, we got this done. I was part of a winning team. And under my stewardship, under my leadership, this younger person, this other colleague is really thriving. So it's a way to pat your own back without seeming so self-interested. I also encourage when I'm coaching individuals, male and female, but maybe particularly women, when I'm coaching them on how to brag without feeling braggy or awkward, I often recommend

that they think about what a more senior person or another colleague is really hungry to hear. So there's very few bosses who don't want to hear about a project going well or about a client being happy or about something having been done under budget or before deadline. And if you keep your comments on what happened or what somebody else did, again, you're providing information that that person really wants and needs because they can convey it to their own boss or they can use it in their own work. So think of yourself in some ways as providing the other person a service when you talk about what you were getting done. And remember, again, that people may not necessarily know what you're doing. You are in your dining room and maybe very far away and not just down the hall. Right. So what else was your advice in that article?

So the other thing that I suggested is for people to have some pretty direct conversations with their managers, but to focus those conversations on priorities as opposed to how am I doing? So if you want feedback, particularly if you're feeling a little anxious or shaky about your position right now, instead of saying, how am I doing? Where do you see this going? How is my job at risk? Instead, go to your boss and say, these are difficult times. And over the next three weeks, over the next three months, my priorities are A, B, and C. Or driving these particular projects is where I'm focused.

If you want to, you can even share that information on a percentage basis. So you can say, of all the time that I'm putting into this job right now, I'm allocating it as follows. It seems to me that's what you need and that's what the team needs given the business context we're in. Do I have that right? And what that allows your boss to do is to give you some rather direct feedback, positive or constructive, but it turns it into more of a peer-to-peer relationship and a conversation about solving a business problem and moving a business forward,

as opposed to saying, soothe my anxiety about how well I'm doing. Yeah. Well, and you can also get a lot of info from the boss about where they think the organization or your team is headed. So that feedback could be helpful in where you refocus your time and energy to further protect your job. Because if you find out your boss is most concerned about a particular initiative, you can say, okay, great, how can I contribute to that? Exactly. And for so many organizations, things have really shifted and people may or may not be on board. They may not have the information. So it can be very reassuring for a manager to know that you are or to have that conversation, to have that up front. Another thing that it does is really signal to a manager that you're thinking in the same way that they are about the business and about getting things done.

You want to make sure that you're aligned, that you're not out for yourself or for just getting work done, but that you're really a good colleague. And I think as managers, as leaders may have to make some additional, very unfortunate choices about who they keep on a team. They're going to want to have people who are thinking like that alongside them, who are saying, how can I, how can I be additive? How can I be helpful here? As opposed to saying, I want feedback just on me myself. Right. Yeah. It's such a great way to build their confidence in you and to build trust.

I love the way you've put that. Daisy, you also talk about finding a teaching moment in that article. What did you mean by that? So I think people can react to crisis in three different ways. The first is that they can sort of panic and freak out and spend all their time talking about the crisis. The second is that they can put their heads down and steady on, do their work, and that's okay. And the third, and we've all witnessed this in moments of pressure, is that they can really take on, whether or not you have this title or see yourself as one or not, they can really take on leadership roles. So if everybody around you is relatively new to the organization and you're going through a crisis, figure out a way that you can help further integrate them, even if everybody's working remote.

If you're working with a lot of junior people who may not understand some of the business implications of what's going on right now, you know, offer to get them all on a phone call and just debrief them and walk them through what some of this means. Or find a moment when, you know, it's just one-to-one to try and develop a junior person or a peer. None of us have a lot of excess time right now. I know I certainly don't, you know, between remote learning your kids and trying to deal with, you know, coronavirus era, everything and keeping up on the news and doing our jobs. It's just there's a lot. And it may not feel like you have a lot of excess bandwidth for this. But if you can do this sort of I'm still investing in my peers, I'm here as a resource to you. I'm setting a bar and a metric that we should all be calm and still working well with each other,

even amidst this terrible crisis. It sends a really, really strong message. And you may not think that people are noticing when you do stuff like this, but they absolutely are. And they're saying, ooh, wow, that person really is handling this well, even under incredible pressure. And

you'll be surprised how much people get an impression of you as cool, calm, and collected, as even amidst a crisis of doing everything that you really want senior leaders to do. Mm-hmm. Daisy, you also advise to get in early. You say don't work longer hours, just earlier ones. Senior people tend to be early birds and they'll notice if you're there. Remember, you don't know who's making decisions about the names on the dreaded list. So what does that mean to get in early when you're sitting at home, I guess, is a question. Yeah. So when we're working at home, we tend to do things when we feel we need to do them. We'll send an email, maybe our first email of the day at 9.30, 10.30 a.m., because that's when we have to communicate to somebody, or we'll jump on Slack or give somebody a call

when there's a business reason to do so. Unfortunately, that can leave people with the impression, even if it's not a direct impression, that you weren't working, that you somehow weren't available or on the job until that time. Because you probably are on really early in the morning, you just need to signal that you are on. So most of us are probably checking emails over breakfast, respond to a couple of them, even just with a very brief answer. It doesn't mean that you're going out of your way to create a completely artificial impression, just that you're conveying the work that you're actually doing. Or let people know

that, hey, I know tomorrow's going to be really busy for you. You're a working parent. You've got a lot going on at home. If you want to talk at 6, 6.30 in the morning, if that's easier for you, I'm perfectly available. I'm not suggesting to people that they work 18 hours a day and sit down at their computers at 5.30 in the morning and go all day. I certainly don't. I'm just suggesting that, generally speaking, it is helpful to shift things a little bit earlier. Again, sending some deliberate small-scale signals that you do have a particular kind of commitment that mirrors that of senior people in an organization. Right. I want to go back to the point you made in that article that Amy B. just read about you don't know who's making the call on who's going to be on that dreaded list.

Because a lot of what we're talking about are things that your immediate manager might notice or see. But we've talked in previous episodes of the podcast about being visible to the most senior leaders in the organization. Any thoughts about the best ways to do that? I think the best way to do that, particularly at a time like right now when people are so overwhelmed when they have so much that they have to do at very senior levels, it's just to make really active use of the CC line. So if you're giving your manager an update of the kind we talked about, if you're saying, hey, here's great work some colleague did, or just to give you a heads up on the fact that we got the project complete or the document off to the client. Just make certain that you're being slightly more assertive than you might typically be and

including people who might be in other departments, who might be in other offices, who might be more senior to you. Not on every single thing. You don't want it to become annoying or gratuitous, but just to loop people in. I also think if you have the conversation on priorities with your boss, that's something that can be very easy for your boss to then communicate upwards. So one thing I typically advise my coachees is when they do have a conversation like that, hey, here's what I'm focused on. Here's what I think is a top priority for me in the next six to eight weeks or six to eight months, that they think about doing that in a very, very simplified one-pager format, something that they can hand off to a boss if they choose,

and is something that can then be used and shared with somebody else. So in other words, give your boss sort of the script, the lines that he or she needs to also be a good advocate for you if they're in conversations when you're not in that room. Right. I'm wondering if you can help us understand, recognize when maybe we've gone a little too far with it. You know, you've acknowledged that sometimes it can seem a little stagey or over the top. So how do you know when you're contemplating something that's maybe a step too far? So I'm a big believer in keeping track of things, and maybe that's my personality. But I think when you are thinking about the touch points you're going to have with senior leaders, you're thinking about how often you're going to toot your own horn to the boss, you're thinking about all these things that may not be natural for you and that may easily,

as you say, go overboard. I would just keep a little log for yourself. It's fine once a week, maybe every 10 days to send an update saying, hey, great news, this part of the project went really well. If you're doing it every other day, then that's going to seem a little bit overboard. It's going to begin to get annoying, I think, pretty quickly. So I think just be conscious of frequency and make certain that you're being honest with yourself about what that is. I've seen a number of people, including some of my coachees, let anxiety get the better of them and effectively overuse these techniques to the point where they work a little bit against them. They take up too much time and they don't sit quite as well with colleagues or

with managers. Yeah. So Daisy, we've been hearing a lot about furloughs lately. They're pretty widespread. Is there anything that you can do if you've been furloughed to protect yourself, to possibly move yourself up the callback list? Any ideas? I think there is just maintaining good communication with the people that you've worked with. They may not have much more information than you do, but the decision about your being called back will be made probably at the level above you or a couple of levels above that. So as long as you can keep yourself as on that radar screen as possible, if there is a decision about who to call back, you want to have telegraphed that you're ready, willing, and able to return to work.

Don't be silent. Don't run off concerned, depressed, and sort of just not get in touch because you're waiting for a big organizational announcement. Make sure you're in there, again, without doing it, you know, too much, without pestering or bothering the people you work with. Try and stay top of mind. So Daisy, we're coming into summer. It's a time of year when most of us kind of tap the brakes, try to relax a little bit, take a vacation. Is that wise right now? What would you advise? Most of the organizations that I'm consulting to right now are so strained, stretched. The people within them are so pressured that I think the idea of announcing, hey, I'll be off for a week or two weeks would come honestly as a surprise to people. And I don't think it's the

kind of surprise that any of us wants to bring. I hate to say that because I am as passionate and an advocate of vacation and time off as anybody you'll ever find. But I just think it's at this point, at this 14th mile of the marathon, it's hard to say, I'm going to go sit down and take a break for a short while. What I do think people need to get a lot better at doing, and I've spent a lot of time coaching people through this in the past several weeks, is finding boundaries and limits. So you may not be able to take a whole week to kick back, even if you richly deserve it, which I think we mostly do at this point, all of us. But that doesn't mean that you need to be on all the time or that you have to be sort of treating your weekend days as if they're weekdays or that you have to completely stop any kind of self-care because you just need to be, you know,

working like crazy. I think that's what's really, really burning people out now is that sense of I'm on the treadmill and there's absolutely no way to jump off. That red button that stops the belt has disappeared somehow and I can't slow down. And that's when people get exhausted. So I'm all for the small bite vacation, the day off, the two hours in the evening, the set hours, giving yourself breaks during the day, all those sort of mini micro breaks that will help keep us resilient when we need it the most. Yeah. Not the summer any of us thought we would have. No.

So I have talked to friends who are in this position of worrying about their jobs at this moment, and many of them describe sleepless nights and just sort of high levels of stress. And I'm curious if you have any advice about how to make sure you don't drive yourself crazy trying to protect your position and overthink it to the point where you're not sleeping. Yeah. And this is going to go back to what may sound like some very basic stuff, but I think it's incredibly important in most people that I talk to anyway, the people who come in and need and want my attentions have put this to the side. The first is just around basic self-care. When people are

that stressed out, I usually find that they're also not eating great. They're not exercising. They're also not connecting with other people outside of their work sphere who can give them support and remind them that it will be okay. They may not be taking adequate time for themselves. And by that, I don't mean days at the spa, but sort of 10-minute walks just to get their heads together. They probably are also not thinking in a way that can be very helpful, which is to really play things through. If you do lose your job, it's very stressful, particularly in this environment. But then think to yourself, okay, what happens next? Well, then I'll likely get unemployment.

That won't be terrific either. But as soon as I get unemployment, I'll start looking for a new job. And then the next thing within a certain number of months, I'll probably be working again. Maybe I'll have to get a very different kind of job. If you start actually forecasting into the future rather than thinking just about the stress of this particular moment, it usually takes a lot of the power away from that future. What is very scary, if you spend some time actually thinking through what your actions would be and how you would live through that, it's still scary, but it's not of the endlessly sleepless nights variety. It takes away some of its dauntingness, if you will. Right.

So I encourage people to just kind of bring it back to basics and also to think, okay, well, here's what that would look like. It might be very, very bad, but not as completely catastrophic as I might be imagining it. Yeah, sort of rehearsing it. Yeah, it's a cognitive behavioral therapy technique. Just play it through and that usually makes you feel better. Yeah. Daisy, thank you so much for talking with us today.

This has been super practical and helpful. Thank you so much for having me. Amy B., I have to admit that I was hoping Daisy would tell us it was okay to slow down this summer. So a little disappointed in her advice. Not that it's wrong. It's just the reality of how challenging protecting your position right now, keeping your job, the pressures we're all under. It's hard to hear. It is hard to hear that we cannot take our foot off the gas.

I was right there with you. And I was almost crestfallen when she said that because the very people who she's addressing with that advice are the ones who are under added stress. They think they're losing their jobs. They are worried that they're not progressing the way they thought they were progressing. So this is just stress on stress for them. Yeah. And I mean, her advice also pointed to not just the pressures we're all under now, which are great, but also the pressures we've been under for a long time. The comment about checking your email at breakfast or.

Oh, my gosh. It's just a reminder of how overworked we were before the pandemic. And it's just gotten worse. Yeah. I will say that, you know, when we talked to Daisy, you know, I've been planning a vacation that I'm actually starting tomorrow. And I did have a moment where I was like, you know, is this the right thing to do? And I had to think it through. And it is the right thing to do right now. Oh, Amy, it is emphatically the right thing.

Yeah, yeah. You cannot imagine how frequently I say to my direct reports and even their direct reports when I'm in touch with them, hey, are you planning a vacation? Or if I get an email on the weekend, I will shoot back, why are you working on a Saturday? I think there are a lot of people who do, a lot of managers who have those same guardrails. But Daisy's advice, given how many organizations she works with, is just a reminder of how many organizations where that's not the case. There are people working Saturdays and Sundays, sending emails all hours of the day, and it's expected.

Yeah, I know. Which is just, that's heartbreaking in many ways. And it's cruel. It's just, it's cruel and it's counterproductive. Yeah. We should always be taking care of the people we can take care of as managers. But now more than ever, we should be taking care of each other. What about you?

You're taking vacation, right? Oh, you're damn right I'm taking vacation. I'm going to take off a week at the end of this month and probably some scattered days the week before that. And I cannot wait. And I hope everyone who's listening to this is taking care of themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I talked to a colleague yesterday who said she doesn't work at HBR, but she said, I can't take a full vacation right now because with everything going on, but I am definitely

taking days off here and there. And I thought, okay, that's good. At least take the time when you can to just sort of recharge, recover, and then get back at it. Right there with you. That's our show. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoke, Adam Buchholz, Mary Du, Tina Tobey-Mack, Erica Truxler, and Rob Eckhart. Thanks for listening. Take good care.